Last month I announced that as part of our charter commitment to Fair and Balanced reportage I would be running a regular, apolitical series looking at what fuckwits the Labour party harbours. Here’s the August edition.

Labour have had a great deal of trouble finding candidates to put up in electorates around the country.

It’s not a great time to have your name associated with the Labour party, and this was particularly true in the East Coast Bays electorate – no one has ever been particularly willing to go up against the hardworking and conscientious, popular and competent incumbent Murray McCully. And rightly so.

This time round, the ECB LEC really scraped the bottom of barrel and found some loser dumb enough to stand.

They found a frumpy housewife/primary school teacher known to her few remaining friends as Viv Goldsmith. She has a morbidly obese, drain on the health system and whingeing pom for a husband who follows her about on the campaign trail.

So what makes her dumb? In the press release announcing her candidacy, the bint chipped in this throwaway line:

“She pledges to be a representative who will have a presence and an availability not seen currently in the East Coast Bays electorate.”

Let’s unpack that a little. Firstly, she pledges to be available and visible locally if elected. Then she implies that the incumbent is something other than the hard-working and popular local his constituents know him to be.

The second claim is an outrageous slur that can be disproved in a cinch. The first is more contentious.

On her website, Goldsmith admits she lives well beyond the borders of McCully Country in the North Shore electorate. Not exactly a new standard of local advocacy is it?

To be fair, a lot of candidates and some MPs don’t live in the electorates they are standing in. But at least they go to some length to get involved in the local community. Not Goldsmith.

Such is her disdain for the people of East Coast Bays, she refuses to even host her fundraisers locally. In fact, she is hosting what she describes as her one “BIG fund raiser!” in another city about eight hours walk from East Coast Bays. Is that really a new standard of representation? Or is it simply the case that Goldsmith has such disdain for people in East Coast Bays she’s hosting a fundraiser many local people would find it difficult to get to.

Living outside the electorate you want to represent and hosting your “BIG fund raiser[s]!” in Avondalé – a suburb in another city – isn’t a new standard of representation. It’s what I call Dumb Labour.

I’m disappointed guys. The post soliciting guesses of the confirmed Labour candidate who in 2004 claimed democracy in New Zealand was dead didn’t attract any good guesses. It was none other than the big-mouthed, stupid fat white woman Kate “pakeha vote for white candidates with names they can pronounce” Sutton.

“Labour not listening democracy is dead”
…Kate Sutton… agrees. She believes that the Government should shape up or ship out. “Students are the only section of society who are forced to borrow to live, they need a living allowance, something which the government has failed to deliver on we are here to tell the government enough is enough.”

For months WOBH has been telling you that democracy is under attack in New Zealand. It turns out that a confirmed Labour party candidate agrees and goes one step further. In the world of Kate Sutton, democracy is dead, enough is enough and this Government must shape up or ship out. Hear, hear!

This story has a more serious undertone. The source who delivered this to me is a well-known Labour activist in Auckland. It seems all is not well in the Epsom LEC, many are unhappy with having Sutton – an inexperienced, career politician linked to the outrageous rorts at Princes Street Labour – forced on them by head office and are actively working against her. One senior Labour activist described Sutton as from the “Axis of Weasel”. Nasty.

More will come on the fractious faction action of the Epsom Labour Party as we hear it.

Brian Fallow has joined the chorus of commentators slamming the knee-jerk government actions to intervene in the market to destrroy private property rights.

Effectively the government is telling shareholders that they should be the ones telling them who they can sell to. Apart from the theft of the right to sell that which is yours the Government has done so at a time with very dire implications for the country.

It has changed the rules in the closing minutes of the game.

And it does this reckless thing at the worst possible time.

The country has for 20 years enthusiastically taken advantage of the opportunities globalisation provides to access foreign capital.

Had we not, had we relied on what we ourselves are prepared to save and invest, the economy would be a lot smaller than it is.

We have in effect outsourced saving. Foreign claims on the economy, both debt and equity, are more than a quarter of a trillion dollars. But our ability to tap foreigners’ savings on tolerable terms depends on being, and being seen to be, an open, stable and low-risk investment destination.

It is dangerous for a country up to its nostrils in debt to the rest of the world to tamper with that perception.

And this is the worst possible time to do it. Fear stalks the world’s markets. Investors are hyper-sensitive to risk and putting a high price on it.

Why then introduce a new source of risk to investing in New Zealand: the risk of panicked, poll-driven, ad hoc regulatory intervention of the kind the Government announced on Monday night?

Why has the government waiting over a year before reacting? Why let the CPP expend millions on its proposal when it had no intention of ever letting it proceed?

The Herald editorial headline says it all. The editorial pulls no punches either.

Finance Minister Michael Cullen says he does not think the Government’s urgent toughening of overseas investment rules will affect this country’s reputation with foreign investors. How could it not? A Canadian pension fund’s bid for a 40 per cent stake in Auckland International Airport has now had two crippling shots fired across its bow. Neither could have been contemplated by potential overseas shareholders when they began examining the airport, given New Zealand’s long-standing and economically essential open door to overseas investment. Now, that has been superseded by Government intervention at the drop of a hat and without consultation. How could foreign investors not be reconsidering this country as a destination for their money?

This is the crux of the matter. The Government has intervened in the market, proof that Labour has become Muldoonist. The last thing this country needs is meddling Government Ministers, but that is exactly what we have got. Worse still, they changed the rules without even putting it before the parliament. But why now?

If the Government genuinely viewed this as the right policy, it could have acted when the airport first attracted overseas interest. The only other possibility is that it sees its days as numbered and, mindful of its place in history, is indulging in the sort of activity that might be expected of a left-leaning government.

If so, why does it not simply buy the shares and return the airport to public ownership? At the moment, it is taking ownership rights from the hands of shareholders, as well as undermining the value of their holdings. That is not a recipe to inspire confidence in the sharemarket.

Exactly, Labour has effectively destroyed the investment of many Kiwi’s by intervening and stifling a legitimate sale of a publicly listed tradeable commodity. Cullen has rocks in his head if he thinks that this knee-jerk reaction won’t affect the country, effectively spiking any attempt to have tax cuts this year, but then perhaps that is Cullen’s masterplan.

This country’s alarming current account deficit means foreign investment is imperative. But twice in quick succession, and without warning, the Government has acted in a way that can only prompt a reassessment of the risk of investing here. Investors hate uncertainty as much as anything. And if the Government intends the new overseas investment rule to be some sort of legacy, it will be disappointed. Unlike some of its policies, this one will not survive a change of government. Economic circumstances dictate as much.

Labour has proven itself negligent in protecting private property rights, in fact negligent is being kind, the reality is they enjoy stealing or at least abrogating private property rights.

The latest invasion and meddling in the rights of private citizens is their change to prevent shareholders enjoying the fruits of their investment by nobbling the CPP AIAL bid.

The Government did not move sooner to nobble the sale of 40 per cent of Auckland International Airport to a Canadian pension fund because it didn’t believe the sale would go ahead, the Herald understands.

The airport company’s board recommended on February 25 that shareholders accept the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board’s offer.

At that point, the Government started thinking of ways to try to stop the deal.

That action alone will suffer the rule of unintended consequences and Cullen will wonder where all the foreign capital went as it abandons a country where the government acts little different to a third world dictatorship in changes rules at its whim.

Where does this lead? Well for one the money that the government thought it was going to get to help fund PPP roading projects will evaporate. Who will fund roads when the government can declare them to be “strategically important infrastructure on sensitive land” and effectively nationalise an asset with out actually paying for it?

This is nothing more than stump politics and a desperate attempt to divert attention from the rapidly expanding HBDHB scandal along with yet another dramatic assault on Mum & Dad investors who have invested in AIAL.

Liz Gordon, an exceedingly large (by the looks of her photo) has decided to an attack column on the Right of the Blogosphere. She has the temerity
to call me “thoroughly weird”.

Still she is the one reading MY blog, if she had one I sure as fuck wouldn’t read hers. Like most sooky journo’s she is puss faced that we get more readership than them and that we can put together more commentary in a day than she can manage in a month of Sundays.

I just love how she calls Stephen Franks and John Boscawen extremists…..fuck if they are extremists then what are most of the blogsphere including the lickspittles of the left. Both men are amongst the politest I have ever met. I even argued with John about being too polite in organising his marches.

Oh and for a good laugh check out the Google ads at the bottom of her article. 3 Rules of Fat Loss Diets and 10 Rules Losing Belly Fat!!!

Cullen really hates tax cuts. It goes against the grain. He told a Select Committee as much with a truly terrible comment.

[quote]Finance Minister Michael Cullen has described workers’ approach to tax cuts as an Oliver Twist mentality – they will just come back for more.[/quote]

I heard this comment in the house when Bill English was tearing into Cullen. Bill had some fantastic lines. He has put some of them again into his press release.

[quote]“At least in Oliver Twist the poor house provided the gruel, whereas in Dr Cullen’s world the poor have provided the gruel and he is reluctantly giving it back to them in teaspoonfuls.”

“Evidence of Dr Cullen’s control freakery is laid bare in the papers released after his last Budget, when he warned his colleagues that their record spending spree would keep interest rates higher for longer."

“New Zealanders need only to reflect on his track record with personal tax reductions. He cancelled the so-called chewing gum tax cuts because New Zealanders weren’t grateful enough – then went on to knowingly bump up interest rates."

“This isn’t Oliver Twist – it’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”[/quote]

King and now Cullen, how many more Government ministers are losing the plot.

Labour are batshit crazy, with finance companies dropping like a whores drawers they announce that their policy for helping drop kicks who can't afford a house is that they will become the lender of last resort!!!!!!

Me? I have only one question, I can afford every house I look at so where is the affordability crisis?

There is always these for those who can't manage with the simple effort of saving a deposit.

If they want to make houses more "affordable" there are easier and quicker ways. I wouldn't do them because, well just because but if you were so inclined then there is only two things to do.

Make 20% deposits mandatory.

Remove the stupid ARC and other Regional Council artifical boundaries limiting development.

That'd do it in about 4 weeks. Less buyers, heaps of stock, more land, even more stock, excess supply over demand voila instant cheap houses. Of course it is electoral suicide but hey everything else the government has touched this year has turned to shit, they might just try that one.